Bafta Awards 2010: Matthew Goode Interview

Matthew Goode yearns for the days when actors behaved badly and got away with
it.

There was a time, says Matthew Goode, when actors were free to speak their minds, when agents and PRs didn’t control the film industry and it was a lot less bland as a result. I can see a wistful gleam in his eye as he says this and it’s plain this is a time he hankers after – and indeed is on a one-man mission to recreate.

Certainly, it’s hard to think of any other actor who says of his last film, the romantic comedy Leap Year, that ‘it’s turgid’. And,what’s more, that, ‘I just know that there are a lot of people who will say it is the worst film of 2010.’ Possibly he will be carted off in the middle of the night shortly after this interview and re-emerge with his lips sewn together, but for the moment, at least, he seems to be doing very well.

We’re actually meeting to discuss his other new film, Tom Ford’s acclaimed, Bafta-nominated adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, in which he plays Colin Firth’s lover. On screen, Goode is apt to look rather smooth and neatly turned out – he was once the face of Hackett, the Sloaney men’s outfitters – but in the flesh he’s a bit more shambolic, bouncing into a pub in north London in jeans, heavy spectacles and a woollen hat.

In fact, there’s something Tiggerish about him, not only in the jangle-limbed way he moves – he’s 6ft 2in – but also in the way he is utterly confident in his ability to win people over, no matter what he says. Every so often, he claps his hand to his mouth and says: ‘Oh God!’ as if he can’t help himself. Yet at 31 he’s old enough, and bright enough, to know exactly what he’s doing. Partly he’s shooting his mouth off because he believes he has every right to and partly because he thinks he can get away with it. It’s a test of his charm, something of which he has considerable reserves.

I’d better make it clear at this point that Goode has no intention of bad-mouthing A Single Man, although he does admit that when he first read the script he found his scenes ‘a little banal’. But when he sat down with the film’s writer/director, fashion designer Tom Ford, he came to see that this banality was deliberate. As for the finished film, he insists he found it brilliant – unlike some of the other films he has appeared in.

‘When you see a finished film, it’s very rare that it exceeds your expectations. Generally, you’re thinking: “Oh no, I don’t think this is going to work out the way I hoped.” This was one of the few occasions when I thought: “Wow, it’s really brilliant.” And I’m hardly in it, so there may well be a correlation there.’ But even here Goode couldn’t resist putting his foot in it. At the New York premiere of Leap Year, a journalist for New York magazine asked him about the marketing of A Single Man. After criticising the distributors for putting co-star Julianne Moore’s face on the poster instead of his – thereby implying it was a heterosexual romance – he weighed into the film’s producers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, for not doing enough to sell it: ‘It doesn’t seem to be getting a push from the Weinsteins too much.’

Up goes Goode’s hand to his mouth once again when I mention this. However, he’s grinning when he takes it away. ‘Do you honestly think I wanted to pick a fight with Harvey Weinstein? To be honest, I’ll know how serious this is when A Single Man premieres over here. He’ll be over for that so we’ll see. He’s a lovely man, though,’ he says, grinning all the harder now. ‘I did get told I would have my wrist slapped as a result, but I didn’t even know about the article.’ If Weinstein stays his hand, it may well be because he read the online comments by those who read the New York article. They are, without exception, lavishly gushy about Goode: ‘I saw him in Brideshead Revisited and looooooved him’, ‘He is so cute’, ‘He’s such a cutie’ – and so on. One man, though, confined himself to a single, plainly hopeful, comment: ‘He’s gay, right?’

Actually, Goode isn’t gay, he lives with his girlfriend, Sophie Dymoke, and they have a 10-month-old daughter. But on screen he has an intriguingly bendy quality – both physically and, so it seems, sexually. In Brideshead he played Charles Ryder, who’s rather more bisexual than he likes to admit. Yet this, alas, was another film that made Goode’s heart sink when he watched it. ‘I got f----- over,’ he says disarmingly. ‘By the script and by what happened with everything else, because there was just nowhere for me to go as the character. I don’t think it necessarily helped that Ben [Whishaw, who played Sebastian Flyte] went down the path of making it so…’ Goode breaks off – but when I say ‘Dour?’, he does not demur. ‘Still, you know, it’s a film. It’s fine. I can sleep at night now. But I do think that Julian [Jarrold, the director] should have given Sebastian to me.’

Soon after the film came out, Hackett, whose posters Goode had graced for the past couple of years, dispensed with his services. ‘It was perfectly amicable, but I think maybe they’d banked on me becoming a bit bigger as a result of the film – and it didn’t really work out that way.’

The only thing that bothers him about being indiscreet, Goode says, is that it might make people think he doesn’t take his work seriously. ‘Because of the way my repartee comes out, people tend to think that I don’t care. Actually, it’s often just a result of my being in a situation where I’m embarrassed about having to talk about a film which I don’t think is that brilliant – but obviously I can’t say that.’ This, however, is not the full story. ‘All right… I do think that it’s important that one should be able to speak out without worrying about causing offence, or whatever. And it saddens me that the romanticism has been ripped out of being an actor.’ You mean the raciness, the bad behaviour? ‘Exactly! It wasn’t like that in Peter O’Toole’s time, was it? Maybe that’s what I love.’

If anyone becomes an actor, and is lucky enough to be successful, then they should just shut up about the less-welcome stuff that comes with success. That, at least, is Goode’s take on fame and its consequences. ‘If there are photographers outside your home, you’re just going to have to get used to it. Most of these people get paid an absolute fortune, so don’t live in LA. Go and find somewhere where these people aren’t going to bother you.’

One of the things that's most interesting about all this tongue-flapping is that not so very long ago Goode used to be an extremely bashful little boy. Brought up in Devon where his mother ran a local amateur dramatics group, he started off by doing small parts in her productions. ‘I was roped into it at first. It wasn’t as if I was this all-singing, all-dancing child ferret that wanted to find some theatre trousers to run up. The trouble was I used to go this beetroot colour. What made it even worse was that the same thing happened when I started trying to go out with girls. I think I was probably quite confident on the one hand and a little shy on the other.’

After doing a degree in drama at Birmingham University, he went to drama school and started getting work pretty much from the moment he left. ‘I suppose it helped that I’m 6ft 2in and I don’t make people physically ill when they look at me. A few, but not all.’ He played Inspector Lynley’s brother in the Inspector Lynley Mysteries and then in 2004, aged 26, he starred in the film Chasing Liberty opposite American pop star Mandy Moore.

‘I think for tax-break reasons they needed an English actor in it. To my amazement, I got the part.’ As for the finished film… Goode grimaces. Nor, he points out, did he get paid anything like as much as people assumed for starring in it. ‘It was one of those classic things where you find out that everyone else is being paid millions of dollars and I got $50,000 – which, when you’ve got bugger all, is great. The trouble is, I ended up with about £12,000 after tax.’

Money is clearly another subject that rankles with Goode. Indeed, he becomes uncharacteristically glum as he considers his own comparative penury. ‘Some actors go, “Bing!” and suddenly they’re being paid huge sums. Me, I seem to get screwed every time. It’s a lot better than it was, but people have this odd idea that I must be a millionaire who swans around accepting roles whenever I care to. I’m very much a jobbing actor who’s still trying to find a place to rent down the road.’

There is a chance that all that might be about to change. After starring in the superhero saga Watchmen last year, Goode’s American agent is keen that he should move to the United States – a move he’s determined to resist. ‘If I lived in LA, I’d be schizophrenic after a week. I’d just sit in a hotel room with a shoebox full of weed going: “I’m not f----- moving. If they want me, they can come here”.’

Now he’s a father, Goode doesn’t even like travelling that much. But just before we met, he’d auditioned for the role of Bilbo Baggins in Guillermo del Toro’s two-part film of The Hobbit. As he is the first to admit, he’s not an obvious choice – ‘Look at the size of me for Christ’s sake!’ If he got the part, he would, he says, find it almost impossible to refuse – despite the fact that it would involve him spending several months in New Zealand.

His unwillingness to travel – or travel far – was behind his decision to appear in Leap Year, in which he plays an Irish innkeeper who finds his flinty heart melting in the presence of an American tourist, Amy Adams. ‘That was the main reason I took it – so that I could come home at the weekends. It wasn’t because of the script, trust me. I was told it was going to be like The Quiet Man with a Vaughan Williams soundtrack, but in the end it turned out to have pop music all over it. A bit like Chasing Liberty again. Do I feel I let myself down? No. Was it a bad job? Yes, it was. But, you know, I had a nice time and I got paid.’

Since then he’s appeared in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s insurance comedy, Cemetery Junction, in which he plays Ralph Fiennes’s prospective son-in-law. ‘Ralph’s character is a complete a---hole and I’m an a---hole in training.’ Cemetery Junction is due out in April, by which time Goode might be Hobbiting about in New Zealand wearing pointy ears and prosthetic feet.

We go outside so that he can smoke a cigarette. ‘I know that in a few hours I’m going to think: “Oh f---, I shouldn’t have said that”,’ he says.

Goode blows out a stream of smoke, looks contemplative for a moment and then perks up. ‘What the hell, you write what you bloody like.’